Roman’s Eye
For sixteen years, the tennis player Andre Agassi brought his racket stringer along to every tournament. “He is old school, Old World, a Czech artiste named Roman,” Agassi writes in Open. “I’ll sit with Roman and watch him string rackets. It’s not that I don’t trust him. Just the opposite: I’m calmed, grounded, inspired by watching a craftsman. It reminds me of the singular importance in this world of a job done well.” Agassi liked to have nine freshly strung rackets for every match. So the manufacturer was constantly sending Roman great big boxes of the same stock racket, by the hundreds. “To the naked eye they look identical,” Agassi writes. “To Roman they’re as different as faces in a crowd.” Recently rereading Open, I saw that on my first read (July 2023), in the margin, I noted: “the eye of a master.”
But in the years since, I’ve collected reasons to think such an eye isn’t really about mastery—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Look At Your Fish
Tacked over his desk, the great biographer David McCullough kept the reminder, “Look at your fish.” A famous nineteenth-century Harvard scientist used to give this test to every new student: he’d place a fish on a pan in front of the student, say, “Look at your fish,” then leave the room. After ten minutes or so, believing there was nothing more to see, the student would track down the professor and tell him all that they saw. “You have not looked very carefully,” the professor would say. “Look again.” When a student named Samuel Scudder hit on the idea of drawing the fish, the professor told him, “That is right, a pencil is one of the best eyes,” then left Scudder to keep looking. He returned hours later, “Do you see it yet?” “No,” Scudder replied, “I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before.” “Look again.” After three long days of this, Scudder thought he might have finally figured it out: “the fish has symmetrical sides with paired organs.” “Of course, of course!” the professor said, before enthusiastically elaborating on the importance of this detail. “What should I do next?” Scudder asked. “Look at your fish!” “I love that story,” McCullough said, “because seeing is so important.” It is as much the work of a historian, a teacher, a coach, an entrepreneur, an investor, a lawyer, a friend, a parent, a partner, “as it is of a poet or a painter.” All of us are in the business of “looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody.”
Learning To Spot Exceptional Information
In 2021, U.S. Army Special Operators were vetting Angus Fletcher, head of a research lab advancing a theory of the brain that had caught the Army’s attention for its potential military applications. In a preliminary interview, three Operators asked him a series of basic questions: What are your parents’ names? Are you married? Where did you go to high school? And within minutes, they noticed something no one in Fletcher’s life—no friend, colleague, teacher, student, or passing acquaintance—had ever noticed: that he spoke with a fake American accent, adopted long ago to conceal his natural English one. They accepted his peculiar explanation for the accent and cleared him to begin working with Army Special Operations. Wrapping things up, the Operators asked Fletcher if he had any questions for them. Yeah, he said: How did you do what you just did? The Operators explained that they were listening for what they called “exceptional information”—odd, unfamiliar details, and his accent sounded odd and unfamiliar, from no particular part of America. “How do I learn to spot exceptional information?” Fletcher asked. They gave him one of their rules: “If you can’t see what’s exceptional, then treat everything as exceptional.” “Treat everything as exceptional?” he repeated. “That’s right. The way you saw the world as a child.” Unable to recall how he saw the world as a child, Fletcher thought about his daughter. When she was six months old, she was eating carrot puree and dropped her spoon on the ground. Fletcher handed her an identical clean one, but she refused it, crying and wanting the original spoon. Fletcher held the two spoons side by side, showing her they were exactly the same. She was unimpressed with the demonstration and kept howling until she got the first spoon back. For years, Fletcher had thought the spoon incident was just a funny example of his daughter being fussy. In fact, she was doing what had seemed so astonishing when the Operators did it: treating everything as exceptional. So learning to spot exceptional information is not really a matter of learning, but of unlearning. As his daughter showed, our “default behavior,” Fletcher writes, is to “assume that everything you see is special.” Over time, this default setting gets worn down—one side-by-side spoon demonstration at a time—“until eventually, our brain’s default becomes: assume that you’ve seen it before.”
Noticing Things Lying Around
When he was 19, the comedian George Carlin was a DJ at a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana. “I had a boss,” Carlin said, “and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time…and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it.” Carlin began capturing things—phrases he liked, “voguish words that come into style and remain there,” observations that made him laugh—on scraps of paper, which he filed in boxes categorized by themes and subjects like “On Humor,” “Oddball Facts,” “The Way We Talk, and “TV-Style Bits.” Well into his career, Carlin would disappoint an admirer—who wanted to believe there was something magical about Carlin’s creative process—by describing his capturing-and-filing system. A lot of creativity, he explained, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”
A Gentleman In A Hotel Lobby
When he was in the investment business, Amor Towles would travel to the same city and stay in the same hotel during the same week, year after year. During one of these annual visits, he walked into the hotel, and there in the lobby, Towles recognized a guy, a stranger, sitting exactly where he had been sitting when Towles was leaving the hotel the year before. “And I was like, ‘God, that guy must live here. What the hell?’” Towles said. “Then in the elevator, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s actually kind of an interesting idea for a novel: A guy gets trapped in a hotel.” When he got to his room, on hotel stationary, Towles sketched out “almost all of the key events of what became A Gentleman in Moscow. (I’m reminded of the line from the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card: “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”
Putting On Art Eyes
Talking to the comedian Mike Birbiglia, the visual artist Wendy MacNaughton said that the job of the artist is just to “put on art eyes.” “Most of the best drawing in the world,” MacNaughton said, “has nothing to do with making a quote-on-quote good drawing. It has to do with seeing what’s right in front of us. I call it, putting on your art eyes.” “That’s what joke writing is too,” Birbiglia said. “The job is, like you said, to put on art eyes. It’s listening, looking, and paying attention.”